Tape is where a lot of glitch texture comes from — head-switching noise, dropouts, chroma smear, and the soft analog degradation you can’t fake convincingly in software. This is a quick field guide to the formats you’ll meet in thrift stores and estate sales, and how to get footage off the cameras that shot them.

Analog formats

• Betamax — Sony’s format that lost the war. Great image for its era; decks are collectible and belt-hungry.
• VHS (full size) — the workhorse. Endless cheap decks, endless cheap tapes, and the most recognizable “tape look” of all.
• VHS-C — compact VHS for camcorders. Plays in a full-size deck with a mechanical adapter — no signal conversion needed.
• Video8 — Sony’s 8mm camcorder tape. Smaller than VHS-C with comparable quality and generally more reliable transport mechanisms.
• Hi8 — higher-band Video8 with better resolution. A sweet spot for glitch camcorder work: cheap, common, and the cameras have composite/S-Video out.

Digital formats on tape

• Digital8 — DV-format digital video recorded on Hi8 tape. Many Digital8 camcorders also play analog Video8/Hi8 tapes and convert them to DV over FireWire — a hidden gem for lossless-ish capture of old family tapes.
• DV / MiniDV — the digital camcorder standard. Capture is a bit-perfect file transfer over FireWire, not a re-digitization, so the quality is exactly what the camera recorded.

Getting footage off the camera

Analog camcorders output composite (and sometimes S-Video) — capture them like any other analog source. Digital tape cameras transfer over FireWire (IEEE 1394 / i.LINK), which means adapter chains on modern machines: FireWire → Thunderbolt 2 → Thunderbolt 3/USB-C is a real and functional stack on Macs. Check the links for the current state of FireWire support on modern systems before buying gear.

If you’re syncing separately recorded sound, the vhs-decode project’s format documentation is a deep well of knowledge about how these tapes actually store their signals.